


Hair Like Sunlight

by bluestle_gold



Category: Blue Beetle (Comics), Booster Gold (Comics), DCU (Comics), Justice League International (Comics)
Genre: M/M, Old Fic Repost, based on art, if I got to write a Rebirth story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-20 18:36:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11341050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluestle_gold/pseuds/bluestle_gold
Summary: Ted dreams of a blond man.





	Hair Like Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> I have a fic I need to update 
> 
> Have this instead

Ted dreams of a blond man.

It’s nothing significant at first. Just a fuzzy image; a man blurred at the edges like dreams usually are with hair that shines like the sun. He can barely make out the man’s face. It’s as if there’s a bright light seemingly coming from the man himself, making him hard to see clearly through the dream fog.

The harder he concentrates on the blond man, the harder it becomes to keep the image in his mind.

He thinks nothing of it, for a while. There’s too much else to worry about, with the Scarab and Jaime and all of that fascinating craziness to handle. He barely sleeps, rarely dreams, doesn’t think about the blonde man and his blurry-bright smile.

But the dreams don’t end. They become clearer with their frequency; Ted begins to dream more and more as exhaustion forces its hand. The blond, smiling blur grows sharper, the dreams become longer, easier to remember.

The blond man is almost always smiling. Almost always laughing, saying something Ted can’t make out. Always shrouded in this spray of golden light, as though it’s reflecting off the blond man himself.

The blond man is always happy in his dreams, until he isn’t.

It’s abrupt, the way the dreams of the blond man change to nightmares. It’s as if the golden glow is dimmed, and the man himself with it. The rows of perfect teeth revealed by the sunny smile disappear as the man grows panicked, terrified. The bright blue eyes grow clouded, sometimes angered, as he sobs, screams, begs in words Ted can’t hear.

Until he suddenly can.

The nightmares give way to a new image, eventually. The same blond man, but more resigned, almost hopeful. It’s the shortest dream he’s had of the man.

“Find me,” the blond man says, neither command nor plead, but Ted feels compelled, wakes up-

And that’s when the dreams stop.

—

“It’s probably just stress.” The female voice from his laptop does nothing to placate him like he’s sure it’s intended to.

“I wasn’t stressed when they started,” Ted insists, wheeling his desk chair past the computer screen as he reaches for another wire. “I’m not stressed now, either.”

“You’re working with a superhero; stress comes with the gig,” Barbara snorts, the sound of her nails against her own keyboard pausing as she squints at Ted through her webcam. “How’s the kid, by the way?”

“Jaime? Kid’s a badass,” the engineer gushes, happy to let their conversation drop in favor of bragging about the accomplishments of the Blue Beetle. “So far the Scarab doesn’t seem to be affecting his health in any way…”

The conversation drifts between Jaime and new tech Ted’s been testing out, to Barbara and her own adventures with Gotham’s bats, before eventually falling back to the blond man.

“I read somewhere that you only ever dream of faces you’ve seen,” Barbara hummed, cutting off Ted’s rant about how Batman would be totally jealous that his batcave could fly-

“I think I’d remember this guy,” he brushes her musings off, pushing his goggles back down over his eyes as he turns toward the mess of wires he’d been working on. “He’s just…”

He trails off, distracted by the wires; distracted by the strange feeling in his chest when he thinks about the blond man, the gasping ache in his ribs when he’d wake from a dream-

Maybe he should talk to his doctor about this.

Barbara lets him stay silent for a few minutes longer, lost in her own thoughts, before saying almost too quietly to be heard by her mic,

“Do you ever feel like you’re forgetting… everything?”

The hushed worry in her voice pulls Ted out of his own head, forces him to look at his computer, where she’s staring at nothing in the middle-distance. “What’s that even mean?”

She shakes herself, as if waking, and frowns.

“Just…” She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s like. I just feel like…” She frowned. “Don’t laugh.”

“No promises.”

A glare.

“…Fine?”

“I just feel like- like there’s a whole lifetime I’ve forgotten. Like someone’s hit reset and didn’t tell me.”

As she speaks, he drifts again, back to the blond man and the words he’d speak that Ted couldn’t hear. Of the things he’d see that Ted couldn’t make out through the dream-fog around them.

Of the throbbing in his head on the worst of those nights, when things were suddenly too clear in that dream-fog world, when Ted would try desperately to remember what he’d dreamed only to think too hard and feel everything slip away again.

As if there was a whole world within those dreams that he couldn’t have back.

“I feel the same,” he wants to say.

Instead, he laughs, and she disconnects.

Maybe it’s better this way.

—

The dreams are forgotten for a while; life continues on as Ted tries his best to play crazy inventor to a teenage superhero and keep his company afloat at the same time.

He ends up in Gotham more than he’d like to admit, visiting Barbara, checking in on the KI building located there.

It’s during one of those visits that he sees the blond man again.

He’s awake. He’s sure he’s awake. Unless he’s fallen asleep while standing on a cold and crowded street corner in central Gotham, he’s definitely awake.

And across the street, flirting with some girl, is the blond man.

Time seems to freeze.

He looks exactly like he did in Ted’s head: stunningly white smile, brilliantly blue eyes, blond hair that seems to shine in the late afternoon sunlight.

The only thing missing is the golden glow.

Ted lurches into the road, legs moving before his brain can think about what he’s doing. Time starts again before he can get close enough, think of something to say-

The car that almost hits him is enough of a distraction that, when he looks up again, the man is gone.

He’s not even sure if he was ever there at all.

—

“I need you to do me a favor.”

Barbara is silent on the other side of the phone for a long beat, two. Ted almost thinks she hung up before,

“That’s not part of my job anymore.”

“Barbra, c’mon,” he practically begs, waving absently to his secretary as he rushes past her into his office. “You’re the only one I know who’s got access to street cams.”

“Ask the boss.”

“Right, ‘cause he’ll totally help. I can see it now: ‘hey, Batman, I need you to check out some security footage so I can prove to myself that I’m not crazy and that I really did see this guy I’ve been dreaming about standing on the street corner when he shouldn’t even exist outside my head’. And that’s if he even picks up the phone.”

Barbara is silent again on the other side of the line save a quiet scoff.

“Babs,” he does beg now. “Please.”

She hangs up without an answer.

—

A few hours later, he gets an email.

You’re not crazy.

Attached is a hazy screenshot of the street corner, with Ted’s blond man front and center.

He’s not crazy.

“Find me.”

He’s not.

“Find me.”

His blond man is real, and he’s going to find him.

—

Of course, making the decision to hunt down a man from his dreams is one thing. Actually going about and finding the man is another.

Besides that photo, he’s got nothing. Just a face can only get him so far.

He calls in another favor with Barbara, has her scan the face, see if it matches anything in the Bat’s many files.

There’s nothing. No name, no record.

It’s as if the blond man doesn’t exist outside of that screen shot and Ted’s own mind.

He’s about to give up, abandon the wild goose chase he’s made for himself, when he gets lucky.

If he was a different man, maybe he’d say it was fate, destiny, God showing him the way, but he’s not a different man. He’s just Ted Kord: a man blessed with sheer dumb luck.

The blond man sees him first, this time. It’s his reaction that gets Ted’s attention in the first place.

He’s in Gotham again, staring at his phone as he weaves through the crowded streets. It’s pure luck that he lifts his head, that his eyes catch on one figure amidst the current of city-goers that isn’t moving, is rooted smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk and staring straight at him, pale and slack-jawed.

Their eyes meet and the blond man turns, runs, shoves people out of his way.

“Hey!”

It’s as if the man wants to disappear.

Ted refuses to let him.

Unfortunately, the blond man is fast, almost too fast. Ted’s lungs and legs are soon screaming in pain as he works muscles he’s forgotten about for too long. Despite the advantage gained by Ted’s terrible health choices, the blond man obviously doesn’t know Gotham, at least Ted can assume, as he sticks to the more populated central streets.

It’s almost too easy to follow him through the crowds.

The man finally ducks away from the main streets, disappearing into the maze of alleyways scattered between the buildings, and Ted forces himself to slow, to listen over his own harsh panting, to try and figure out which way the blond man went.

He holds his breath, listens.

“…you could’ve told me that he was-!”

There. A man’s voice, distressed.

“Yes, I do think that this is a pretty damn important thing to-“

Ted’s perfectly content to listen to the blond man whisper-shout at whoever it is he’s on the phone with. Unfortunately, fate-destiny-God-whatever has another plan which involves him trying to sneakily peek around the corner of the building, trip over his own two feet, and let out the most unmanly yelp as he face plants into the disgusting alley pavement.

“What the-“

Ted unsuccessfully tries to scramble back to his feet in a dignified manner, instead floundering for a moment before using the wall to help with his ascent. He’s babbling some excuse for why he was eaves dropping while the blond man is asking him if he’s okay and neither are really listening to the other until they both suddenly fall silent and just… stare.

The staring probably goes on for too long, but Ted… can’t help it. Here, in front of him, is the man he’s been dreaming about. Here he is in all his blue-eyed, golden-haired glory and-

And…

He wasn’t really sure what he was expecting, but he’s pretty sure it isn’t this.

The blond man is just… staring at him. Granted, he’s staring back, but he’s seeing a man who he’s always seen only in dreams-

Unless this man’s been having the same type of dreams?

The blond man has been staring the whole time Ted’s thinking all of this way too fast and all at once. Staring with wide eyes and a pale face etched with a look that would look at home on a starving man seeing food.

It’s… creepy. But not in a terrible way.

“I’ve dreamed about you,” Ted blurts before his filter can kick in. His words seem to break their staring trance, the man before him flinching before a wide, familiar grin spreads across his cheeks.

“That, by far, is the corniest pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

Oh. Ted’s blushing now, glaring at the man. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah?” He’s still grinning, his eyes laughing, and Ted’s chest is aching again. “What did you mean?”

Ted opens his mouth, closes it again, still glaring. There was absolutely no way of explaining what he had meant, so instead, he wordlessly extends his arm.

“I’m Ted Kord,” he introduces. “and I’m going to buy you a drink as an apology for chasing you into an alley.”

The man stares at his hand, wordless for a moment, as the grin taped to his face fades into something more natural, almost fond in a strange way. He takes Ted’s hand in his own, and it’s like being stung, the sudden jolt of something that seems to hit them both as their hands meet, the feeling both excitingly familiar and terrifyingly unknown.

“Booster,” the blond man replies. “I could go for a drink.”


End file.
